Shells, 2007

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

125 x 98 cm

Est. $4,000 – $6,000

Hammer $6,000

Provenance: Mornington Island Arts & Crafts, Mornington Island, Qld, Cat No. 2348-L-PP-0607 The Jacquie McPhee Collection, WA
Artwork story: "Along the beach of my country are big white rocks," Paula Paul said in the 2013 exhibition catalogue My Country: A Collection of Fine Mornington Island Indigenous Art, published by ReDot Fine Art Gallery, Singapore. "I paint them and I paint the little white shells that are up on the beach. We call them dinghy shells." The shells of Bentinck Island are not simply a motif. They are a form of return. Paula painted on Mornington Island during the wet season for decades, and she described painting by thinking about what the reefs and fish traps look like on her country, thinking about the last time she saw them, thinking herself there. The Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island had little contact with non-Kaiadilt people and none at all with European settlers until 1948, when drought and cyclone forced their removal to Mornington Island. Paula Paul was among them. For more than forty years the Kaiadilt lived a largely separate life within the Lardil and Yangkaal communities of Mornington Island before those able to live independently negotiated their return to Bentinck in the early 1990s. Paula came late to painting, but the knowledge she brought to it was anything but recent. This canvas, acquired from Mornington Island Arts and Crafts by collector Jacquie McPhee, sets concentric roundels in red, yellow, white and pink arcing and spiralling across a deep cobalt ground, the whole surface alive with the rhythmic accumulation of individual marks. It is, by Paula's own account, both a precise description of country and an act of being present in it.

Catalogues193 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 45

Kuruwarriyingathi Bjarrb Paula Paul

c.1937 – 2021

Region: Cape York, Gulf & Far North Queensland
Community: Mornington Island (Gununa)
Language group: Kayardild (Kaiadilt, Gayardilt)

Shells, 2007

synthetic polymer paint on canvas

125 x 98 cm

Est. $4,000 – $6,000

Hammer $6,000

Provenance: Mornington Island Arts & Crafts, Mornington Island, Qld, Cat No. 2348-L-PP-0607 The Jacquie McPhee Collection, WA
Artwork story: "Along the beach of my country are big white rocks," Paula Paul said in the 2013 exhibition catalogue My Country: A Collection of Fine Mornington Island Indigenous Art, published by ReDot Fine Art Gallery, Singapore. "I paint them and I paint the little white shells that are up on the beach. We call them dinghy shells." The shells of Bentinck Island are not simply a motif. They are a form of return. Paula painted on Mornington Island during the wet season for decades, and she described painting by thinking about what the reefs and fish traps look like on her country, thinking about the last time she saw them, thinking herself there. The Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island had little contact with non-Kaiadilt people and none at all with European settlers until 1948, when drought and cyclone forced their removal to Mornington Island. Paula Paul was among them. For more than forty years the Kaiadilt lived a largely separate life within the Lardil and Yangkaal communities of Mornington Island before those able to live independently negotiated their return to Bentinck in the early 1990s. Paula came late to painting, but the knowledge she brought to it was anything but recent. This canvas, acquired from Mornington Island Arts and Crafts by collector Jacquie McPhee, sets concentric roundels in red, yellow, white and pink arcing and spiralling across a deep cobalt ground, the whole surface alive with the rhythmic accumulation of individual marks. It is, by Paula's own account, both a precise description of country and an act of being present in it.